Middle-Earth Maven Creates Massive LOTR Family Tree

Emil Johansson is a Swedish chemical-engineering student who moonlights as a genealogist—of men, elves, hobbits, and dwarfs. Creator of the Lord of the Rings Project, Johansson is on a quest to track every character from Tolkien’s fictional world. He started by creating a massive family tree, and from there he crafted an interactive map of Middle-earth and a timeline of events in Tolkien’s stories. He has even performed statistical analyses on the characters’ race, lifespan, and gender. Johansson points out that the lopsided gender split (81 percent male, 19 percent female) reflects the world Tolkien included in his tales of the ultimate war, but probably not Middle-earth in its entirety. Since LotrProject.com launched in January, Johansson has received hundreds of emails applauding his effort, while also pointing out missing dwarfs and other errors. He released an Android app in March (and is considering one for iOS)— just in case you need to settle a debate about hobbit lineage while on the go.

Tolkien by the Numbers

After laying out the tree, Johansson wanted to see how the number of characters changed over time—something he could do because of Tolkien’s remarkably detailed world. For Wired, Johansson plotted the population of beings for whom Tolkien provided birth and death information. (Elves, as everybody knows, never die.)